Freedom is such a gift....

I think about death a lot, like I think we all do. I don't think of suicide as an option, but as fun. It's an interesting idea that you can control how you go. It's this thing that's looming, and you can control it.

I just sort of take it from a character perspective, and I don't know if he was necessarily spiritual, but I do think he had hope. He was a character that was comfortable having hope in his life, and hope is faith.

I grew up in a family of strong women and I owe any capacity I have to understand women to my mother and big sister. They taught me to respect women in a way where I've always felt a strong emotional connection to women, which has also helped me in the way I approach my work as an actor.

Books were my pass to personal freedom. I learned to read at age three, and soon discovered there was a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi.

Before anything else, we need a new age of Enlightenment. Our present political systems must relinquish their claims on truth, justice and freedom and have to replace them with the search for truth, justice, freedom and reason.

In my youth I stressed freedom, and in my old age I stress order. I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order.

Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.